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Has the internet turned our students into great big cheats?

© Amanda Kendle

Accurate assessment of student ability relies on many factors, and an important one is that a student’s performance on an assignment or exam is a good reflection of their true ability. Cheating has been around in many forms for many years - an older sister wrote the essay; a student wrote important dates and details on his arm before the exam; the ingenious list of sneaky student feats is endless.

But has the internet made cheating even easier, and encouraged increasing numbers of students to adopt dishonest practices? Some would answer, most definitely yes, because the internet has made it so much easier. The biggest cheating market on the internet is for essays and other written papers. A gamut of sites enable students to search for and download essays on nearly every topic imaginable. Some sites ask for money in exchange for this, while others offer a free exchange, encouraging students to post their own essays for others to use. Of course, few of these sites advocate plagiarism or cheating too loudly - many have half-baked excuses recommending students can get suggestions and ideas from the essays they retrieve from the site and incorporate these into their own work. But at a site where a student pays $18.95 per page, one would suspect that they are expecting a final version with no more work to do.

So how can we eliminate these sorts of problems? How can we encourage students to do the work for themselves, which is, of course, a very important part of the learning process?

Teachers can make it clear to students that essays bought or borrowed from anywhere - not just the internet - will be discovered and heavily penalised. Many institutions can exclude a student from a course as punishment for cheating. But how can teachers uncover this cheating? There are a variety of low-tech and hi-tech methods, and the link below to the first of a series of articles in “Student Affairs On-Line” has useful suggestions including tips for detecting work found online and using online plagiarism detection software and sites.

A more effective approach to stamp out online plagiarism is to set assessment tasks which lessen the opportunity for cheating. Asking students to relate the topic to their personal experience can help this, as can requiring an essay to include a discussion of the student’s opinion on something specific to the course, perhaps an in-class debate or a particular case study presented in lectures. Alternatively, students may be required to bring their completed assignment to class and answer a short question related to it under test or exam conditions, to verify their understanding of what they have written.

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